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Last Phase of the Desktop Wars?

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Re: Last Phase of the Desktop Wars?

#131

Post by znpy »

thelazydogsback wrote: post #95
znpy wrote: post #89

I really don't care much about the desktop wars thing, but if there's one thing that I honestly thing this is it: In the desktop wars nobody has really won, but all the users have lost. GNU/Linux on the desktop has improved a lot, but it's still very far from being good. Mac OS is very good, but it's extremely expensive because of the hardware. Windows was very good for desktop but had stability problems. Nowadays Wi…

> Windows was very good for desktop but had stability problems. Nowadays Windows is just awful for the desktop user, Microsoft is literally conducting a war against its own users. I don't get this. I've been using *nix since PDP11 and VAX/Ultrix and I have no problems with Win10 at all, stability or otherwise - I'd much rather use it as a desktop dev environment than Linux. When it comes time to deploy something, sur…

We technical people should really start to understand that we're not the average use. Not even close.

I'd have no problem in mutilating Windows enough to make it usable, and keeping an eye for when it tries to do something nasty.

But the average user won't, and will have a computing experience filled with unnecessary advertising, encumbered by background processing and bandwitdh usage (telemetry collection and other windows background stuff that are not end-user activities).

It's just awful.

Re: Last Phase of the Desktop Wars?

#133

Post by eyeball »

unnouinceput wrote: post #112
eigen wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

probably Windows Privacy Dashboard. https://wpd.app/

Yup, that one. Thought is well known by now. 1st tool to download after a fresh install, even before I download Total Commander.

How do you know it's safe? I cringe at giving admin rights to a .exe downloaded from the net.

Re: Last Phase of the Desktop Wars?

#134

Post by fmajid »

blowfish721 wrote: post #45
mdifrgechd wrote: post #18

I'm buying a new computer. Currently I have only ubuntu linux machines and was just saying to someone that I would actually consider trying windows and WSL because it would let me use the linux tools I want alongside MS office, and it might be interesting to play with windows versions of things. The reason I wont actually do it though is because I'm sure that windows will be filled with commercially oriented intrusio…

Hopefully you’ve disabled Ubuntus motd service on your machines. https://mobile.twitter.com/lelff/status/1210619413885575168 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14662088

Those instructions don't strike at the root. What you should do is remove the motd entries in /etc/pam.d/login and /etc/pam.d/sshd

Re: Last Phase of the Desktop Wars?

#135

Post by Impossible »

grishka wrote: post #66
3np wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Those parts are easily removed by doing a vanilla install the first thing you do. Windows (esp 10) still had some built-in things you don't get away from though. And also all the dialogues from self-updating software and plugins.

It is possible to disable or uninstall all the user-hostile components like Windows Update, telemetry, and the app store, but it takes some effort and manual registry editing. The bigger problem, though, is all the legacy that's holding it back in the name of backwards compatibility. The WinAPI is older than myself. You can still run Windows 95 programs on your new Windows 10 PC. While useful to some, I'll never unde…

Legacy support and continued backwards compatibility is one of the biggest strengths of Windows. I can still run weird games I made 15-20 years ago without issue. As a regular users of both MacOS and Windows, I don't agree that MacOS feels more stable, recently it's felt less stable than Windows, but obviously that's anecdotal and depends on usage.

Re: Last Phase of the Desktop Wars?

#136

Post by buzzerbetrayed »

Impossible wrote: post #135
grishka wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is possible to disable or uninstall all the user-hostile components like Windows Update, telemetry, and the app store, but it takes some effort and manual registry editing. The bigger problem, though, is all the legacy that's holding it back in the name of backwards compatibility. The WinAPI is older than myself. You can still run Windows 95 programs on your new Windows 10 PC. While useful to some, I'll never unde…

Legacy support and continued backwards compatibility is one of the biggest strengths of Windows. I can still run weird games I made 15-20 years ago without issue. As a regular users of both MacOS and Windows, I don't agree that MacOS feels more stable, recently it's felt less stable than Windows, but obviously that's anecdotal and depends on usage.

I don't see the problem with GP's suggestion. Couldn't you still run your 15-20 year old games if Windows 10 shipped with a Windows XP VM that integrated seamlessly with the Desktop?

Re: Last Phase of the Desktop Wars?

#137

Post by xnyan »

varbhat wrote: post #22

I am afraid of EEE strategy of Microsoft . But,Windows having WSL means that Developers can target Linux only without even considering Windows , being sure that all Linux binaries run on WSL . But proprietary extensions of WSL should never ever be used.

>But,Windows having WSL means that Developers can target Linux only without even considering Windows

I've been using WSL1 and WSL2 regularly since they were in beta. They have both exceeded my expectations. I still SSH into my local development box I use for webdev and the like because it's still faster, less limited and more powerful than WSL/2. Again, I think WSL is awesome and I use it all the time - to do a few linuxy things here and there on my windows box. It's nice, but it is in no way a production-grade replacement for native linux.

Re: Last Phase of the Desktop Wars?

#138

Post by Impossible »

buzzerbetrayed wrote: post #136
Impossible wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Legacy support and continued backwards compatibility is one of the biggest strengths of Windows. I can still run weird games I made 15-20 years ago without issue. As a regular users of both MacOS and Windows, I don't agree that MacOS feels more stable, recently it's felt less stable than Windows, but obviously that's anecdotal and depends on usage.

I don't see the problem with GP's suggestion. Couldn't you still run your 15-20 year old games if Windows 10 shipped with a Windows XP VM that integrated seamlessly with the Desktop?

It's possible that performance would be an issue with some use cases, startup times, etc. Eventually this will probably be a reality, in the same way you can't run DOS binaries without an emulator or VM

Re: Last Phase of the Desktop Wars?

#139

Post by fsflover »

znpy wrote: post #89

I really don't care much about the desktop wars thing, but if there's one thing that I honestly thing this is it: In the desktop wars nobody has really won, but all the users have lost. GNU/Linux on the desktop has improved a lot, but it's still very far from being good. Mac OS is very good, but it's extremely expensive because of the hardware. Windows was very good for desktop but had stability problems. Nowadays Wi…

> GNU/Linux on the desktop has improved a lot, but it's still very far from being good.

Not sure what you are talking about. Just buy a Linux-certified laptop and don't install Linux on Windows-certified one and it will work just fine. Happy Linux user here.

Re: Last Phase of the Desktop Wars?

#140

Post by thelazydogsback »

znpy wrote: post #131
thelazydogsback wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Windows was very good for desktop but had stability problems. Nowadays Windows is just awful for the desktop user, Microsoft is literally conducting a war against its own users. I don't get this. I've been using *nix since PDP11 and VAX/Ultrix and I have no problems with Win10 at all, stability or otherwise - I'd much rather use it as a desktop dev environment than Linux. When it comes time to deploy something, sur…

We technical people should really start to understand that we're not the average use. Not even close. I'd have no problem in mutilating Windows enough to make it usable, and keeping an eye for when it tries to do something nasty. But the average user won't, and will have a computing experience filled with unnecessary advertising, encumbered by background processing and bandwitdh usage (telemetry collection and other…

I guess it depends on what you want to spend your time and emotional energy on. I use Win10 as it is "out of the box", and apply all automatic updates. If MS wants my telemetry or whatever, that's okay by me. If I'm in Firefox or running multiple VsCode/VStudio/IntelliJ/etc instances or running bash scripts or whatever, I can't see how it would offend so much - but I guess that's just me - but I'm not even trying to make Windows look like Linux or use it like it as one. As for the UI, all I really do is hit the Win key and type a few chars and hit enter and run what I want - no desktop icons, no theming, etc., and I Alt-Tab between full-screen apps or Ctl-Alt-Arrow between desktops -- that's about it. Maybe I'm just weird, but I don't find anything especially that gets in the way.

Edit: Okay, I probably turned off indexing and the Cortana mic. access (was that enabled by default?), but that's about it. And I had to disable some Dell-specific bits from my son's laptop that limited network bandwidth for all non-video packets. WTF?

I achieved a huge about of peace when I went from HD to SSD -- in addition to the speed, once I couldn't see the drive light or hear the disk being accessed when I wasn't doing anything, I found it wasn't really getting in the way.

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